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Newsflash, Mercial: No cut with an ax is clean. You can only safely humanely kill an equine with a strong blow to the forehead (bullet or captive bolt, in other words). Even factoring in that they don’t care if they’re humane, they still won’t get very far with the ax.

OK, Quinn’s needed to save the day, unless the adults show up now. I have a feeling if the adults ended up on the scene they’d put an end to this when the cubs would shout the situation upon seeing them. But I could be optimistic about this.

Did he? wow now this changes almost everything, WOW that is one Scary looking rabbit! I never thought i’d ever have to say that 😮 Why is this beginning to remind me of “Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban??” Where are Dumbledore & Hermione when you need them

“Harmless” is not how I would describe either henchperson. Mercial is all business, but those two are taking a positively sadistic glee in the proceedings. And Mercial’s comment to Strom sounds rather ominous. How many cuts has he “not” made clean?

Aye, tho to nitpick, the hammer *is* oversized – unless the head is two different metals of seriously different densities, it’d have seriously bad balance. Still better that 99% of poleaxes in fiction, however. 😀

And it looks like I was right about it being an open bounty. I’d also be surprised if it [i]wasn’t[/i] for the demon horse dead by default – alive might be an option, I’m sure, but remember that the adults didn’t really know what the creature was, specifically, and Cyanthia is home to some frighteningly dangerous wildlife. And they might not be equipped to take it alive, even if they wanted to.

Also nice to know the hunters have standards, or atleast their leader. ‘Wait ’til they’re out of sight’ is actually protective behavior, so that might tell us something of her character. Wanting a clean kill might be for ethical reasons, but it could as easily be for safety reasons, amongst others.

It’s also possible that the horse is going to do something unexpected. It’s probably engineered, afterall, so who knows if it has surprises?

SnowFox102: For certain values of clean, maybe – in this case, I’d wager it’s a quick kill. And you’re seriously underestimating the kind of damage a big guy with a poleaxe can do in one swing, especially one experienced in it’s use – iRL standards for putting a horse down(or most anything, really) are going to be based on a number of assumptions. There are almost always effective, alternative methods – I’m sure strapping a few pounds of C4 to it’s chest would be just as effective and humane, for example.

The axe could be made partially of Cyantium. (The metal which gives Cyantzium it’s name as a planet.) Cyantium negates gravity and makes objects lighter than they would be with ordinary materials. Oh, and yes, I did consider that a lighter axe might be a little less effective than a heavier axe. A lighter axe is still better than one you can’t lift. 😉

And “Clean kill” might mean intact enough to stuff and sell. Although I do agree that waiting for the cubs to be out of sight is a good thing to see Mercial doing. Although that does provide extra time for the Cavalry. AKA: The Big Damn Heroes.

Which… would actually make a more effective weapon, once you’re experienced with it; all the Kinetic Energy, less effort wasted fighting gravity. Still, being back-heavy would make the head unbalanced and harder to control for no gain(and control is the issue, not weight) – the back would always pull down, twist the shaft against the direction of the swing, and add a twisting recoil whenever you hit something and didn’t bury the axe deep enough to counter it(and both are bad in a fight – they leave you open and exposed for valuable seconds).

Personally I’d just shoot it, but there might be legal complications that limit their weapon choice.

New to this comic, and honestly I don’t know why I didn’t have a look before. (Probably because I spend most of my time with AD). Amazing artwork there, Tiff. I am stunned that you can keep all your comics’ stories so separate, and yet each one is great, and so engaging. Since I have only just started reading the Cyantian Chronicles, forgive me for not knowing the terminology, but the ‘energy’ on the flaming horse is so lovely. Wonderful!

I think Tiff will (again) surprise us all ^_^
And I love it, not knowing what will come next. With some stories you know what will happen next and it gets boring pretty quickly. With Tiff however.. you’ll never know ^^

Cyantium negates gravity. However, there is nowhere that it says it negates mass as well. This means you can have a huge axe made of Cyantium that you can lug around without collapsing under the weight, but you still need arms like Popeye if you actually wan to swing it!

Is Cyantzium not three times larger than earth? Therefore wouldn’t gravity also be three times greater? Gravity is the attractive forces between objects of mass. Weight is mass being measured to a certain gravity. Since we only do large amounts of measuring on earth, as we’ve only been to the moon, for all intensive purposes standard earth gravity creates a standard mass for objects.
Also having any of you used a splitting maul? Perhaps this axe uses the same principle. However axes that large would be rather difficult to use in combat, so it seems a bit impractical to carry around a weapon that really can only chop effectively in a downward motion. I mean bounty hunters probably fight things that run around and jump and move. So unless that rabbit is their executioner, that axe would need some special properties.

I am not liking Strom right now. Or Mercial. For the most part, I am agreeing with Victor Voracious and Black Hat. However, I think that Syrys would find swinging that ax a WHOLE lot easier than Strom the rabbit.
What we need here right now is Syrys and The King suddenly playing the part of the Cavalry. If push comes to shove, either of those individuals would be a match for 2 of those bounty hunters by himself. There are 2 of them and only 3 bounty hunters that we’ve seen. Plus, I remember Syrys and The King riding out with something of an enterage.

@ Black hat, had it not occurred to you that this comic is about wolves and foxes with special abilities, and perhaps is not subject to the laws of earth physics? As for the weapons, well perhaps Cyantian musculature is adapted to give super strength. Sorry you just amuse me.

eh fair enough. Just pointing out the laws of our universe relative to those of a fantasy world. Something about Strom reminds me of Robin Hood and his band of merry men. We’ll see what happens. I think that horse will remain alive. Silver will probably somehow cause delay, and someone will save them all, most likely Syrys and company.
The look on that mouses face is absolutely hilarious. @Tom Redlion, aren’t there four bounty hunters, the mouse, Cobalt, Mercial, and Strom?

I wonder if the Fennec herself might stop them… after all, the Demon Horse doesn’t look like something your average, everyday person would have as a pet. Perhaps she’s an emissary, or even foreign nobility… and they’re about to execute a royal mount… and cause an international incident. 😛

Also, ancient armies have used axes about the size of the one Strom has, to great effect. Well, length-wise, but with modern metallurgy we could prolly make something that bulky while keeping the mass down, even without funky sci-fi materials.

Of course, Black_Hat, if you mean “if someone could REALLY manipulate energy (i.e. one of those reading this)”: I don’t really see why someone lobbing around balls of energy would be any more dangerous (or scary) than someone grabbing a gun and starting to shoot people…

ummm plus this list of unpleasantries:nuclear fission and fusion at will, teleportation, moving planets or other objects of mass, playing around with the multiverse (as gravity is thought to affect the multiverse), or even bending space time on a whim. I think energy/matter or gravity manipulation is much worse than any weapon of modern warfare, especially in the wrong hands. As I said *shudder*. I’m just glad its fantasy.

Uh, this isn’t The Rowan here. Psychics and Energy Manipulators tend to have a finite upper limit on their potential abilities. The limit is usually governed by endurance, skill and focusing/enhancement equipment.

It gets impressive and dangerous, but not THAT powerful. Besides, even if you could command fission or fusion with your mind, would you use that level of power carelessly?

Real morality tends to exceed the scope of D&D alignment. For starters, good and evil are subjective – almost noone you’d say were evil from throughout history would view themselves the same, and more than a few might see you as evil, for assorted reasons. We also have almost nothing to use as a basis for speculating on their motives; it really boils bown to, king places bounty on dangerous animal(and is presently hunting said animal himself), bounty hunters find and seek to dispatch said animal, and ignore a spoiled cub(who, by being out here, has probably already demonstrated questionable judgment) yapping on about how she wants to keep the dangerous animal as a pet.

In their position, I imagine I might do the same.

Now, Black_Hat’s “as gravity is thought to affect the multiverse” gives me something of a WTF – I really don’t know where to start with that, save to say that I think he’s confusing real science with sc-fi.

And yeah, powers in Cyanthia seem very much limited, by user talent and technofamiliar size. Personally I’d be more worried if you could build machines to do all that – for example, what’s scarier, a few people with deathray eye-beams, or anyone with a little money being able to buy an illegal automatic weapon? Heck, with a decent machine shop and the skill to use it, you could build your own machine gun iRL – it’s not like you can’t find the plans freely on the internet.

Anyone having that kind of access to technomage abilities, even if they need toys to pull it off, would be pretty scary. And then you have more issues than access – imagine being able to plug your faux-technomage gear into a fusion reactor? Or build effector arrays the size of a house? And that’s just private individuals.

@KHGV Defenestration Its entirely theoretical, but that is why garvity is thought to be the weakest of the four universal forces (magnetism, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and gravity). Gravity has already been theorized to bend space time…
I have to agree with you on the fact that industrialized super abilities would be quite frightening. Very reminiscent of Iron Man or the Incredibles.
I also agree with you about evil being entirely relative. Its all about one’s perception of the world.

It is now commonly accepted that gravity bends space time (and light actually, but that is a different matter). The description I’ve heard most often is a piece of cloth with a ball in it. The bend is similar to that of the ball on the cloth. The ball creates a depression in the plane of the cloth, like a massive object on the plane of space time.
This fact, however, doesn’t answer the question about the multiverse. The multiverse itself is still theoretical and widely debated, but to me it is a sound idea. Whether the other universes are touching or even like our own, we may never know. Our universe is so big we may not get around to exploring it all. I, however, would like to think that each level of dimension so to speak has it’s own universe. The level of a dimension, as far as I can tell, is the level of variables that make up said dimension. For example the 2D versus 3D, the third-dimension has a z value along with the x and the y of the second. We live in the fourth dimension as of now (maybe the fifth I don’t know) with our place in time being the fourth variable (this makes time travel theoretically possible, because if one thinks about it, one may come to the conclusion that since we can change x, y, and z, why not t? Once again for another time).
Once again, to get back to the multiverse, what happens when our own dimension/universe is bent? What if are universe became so bent it collided with another universe of a higher dimension? Disaster (any one see Donnie Darko, the science may be essentially fake but it is a similar idea universes colliding = end of the world).
Bending space time is, however, not all bad. One could take the cloth example again. One could draw a dot on the cloth saying this point was earth and another dot to say that that point was Alpha Centauri or any other distant object. One could travel across the plane of space time, along the cloth; or one could fold the cloth, bending space time and connecting the dots. This is one theory for long range space travel.

Probably sick of hearing from me…but I find it comic that a conversation based around the properties of an axe in a fictional universe, an axe, might I add, that none of us truly knows anything about other than what is obviously stated in the image, has become a discussion about space time and gravity. I just love blowing things way out of proportion and taking them to an unnecessary degree of debate. Its what makes discussion fun. I’m pretty sure the properties of said axe aren’t going to matter in the long run, but it is still very amusing to discuss them.

Sounds like you’re talking about string theory – which, I might add, comes in the proverbial 31 different flavours, and is totally unsubstantiated; the best description I’ve yet heard, is that String Theory is, essentially, math porn. 😀

Also, spatial dimentions, which string theory claims are responsable for gravity’s weakness(and doesn’t explain why it’s influence reaches so far), are not the same as universes. And don’t get me started on time. But what you seem to be betting at, might be membranes, or branes, if I’m right and you’re pulling stuff from string theory rather than sci-fi. Which is again, baseless speculation with some fancy math backing it – the fact that string theory, by and large, cannot even theoreticly be proven or disproven makes it something aproaching bad science.

Also, gravity bending light would be a result of it bending space, as light, and everything else, travels through space(in fact, gravity’s effect on light clued us in to the fact it might be bending space instead, as light is massless). Although we don’t even know what space or gravity even are – the what and the why and the how – and we understand so little.

Also, on the sci-fi track(because I can), alternate universe ≠ parallel universe. The first is the result of divergent time lines/etc.(a popular enough mechanism for dealing with paradoxes/etc. resulting from time travel, and also opens the door to fun things like quantum immortality), the second are outright separate universes and where you’ll find the classic IDIC-style multiverse – not that a parallel universe can’t be effectively identical, but that’s just part of the Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations deal it’s got going.

Meh, I just like interesting discussion. We could go to Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Especially considering Dark Energy is essentially anti-gravity and Dark matter also bends light…

A counter to your sci-fi track: I like to think of the multiverse as an onion. Each dimension is a progressively inner layer of an onion. The first-dimension being at the center and the higher level dimensions towards the outside. So if one dimension is bent it either collides with the others or bends them too. Interestingly enough, a similar idea is presented in Digimon. In season three, I think, one of the problems they were facing and had to solve was the fact that the real world and the digital one were colliding causing them to meet. This allowed for digimon to come to the real world in the first place, but it also created havoc for all other nearby planes of existance too. Eventually, if left alone they would all swirl into a spirally doom.

Also I like string theory. I just think such theories, even if they are based on sticks and artificially constructed math that works on paper but not in the universe. In fact, in way its like our beloved laws of Newton. Its flaw, however, is it doesn’t solve the problem of that it was trying to fix in the first place: reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Oh Mr. Einstein setting the limit of of the universe at light speed, what have you done. I just find it funny that he didn’t believe a lot of what he said.

Multiverse = multiple universes. Dimension = spatial axis, a direction of travel. While often taken to be the same thing, they’re quite different.

In your onion example, what you have is a hypersphere(a sphere with 4 spatial dimensions), a concept that can be interpreted and used exactly eleventy billion different ways, the most common being other-space FTL drives. What alot of people don’t realise, however, is that a 3D universe is infinitely thin along any 4th spatial axis, which means [i]any[/i] measure of 4th dimensional volume can contain an infinite number of them, with associated infinite mass and energy. If you’re allowing gravity to cross, you’re going to need rather… large, dead-zones between ‘layers’. I’ll stop there for now, however, seeing as I could write a small book just examining the concept and what can be done with it in any depth.

Now, Dark Matter and Energy are called Dark because we can only indirectly infer their existence. Dark Energy is used to fill the gap between how much stuff we think must be in the universe and what we can account for, that it’s been granted responsibility the quickening expansion of the universe is speculation, and that force is very much not ‘anti-gravity’, given we’re talking about space itself expanding, not just the stuff in it being pushed apart. Dark matter, meanwhile, arose from observed galaxies not having enough observable mass to account for their structure and motion – “something with mass/gravity that we can’t see, we just know there’s alot of it.” It’s ability to bend light is entirly a result of it’s gravity, something that anything with gravity can do, and is rather not surprising given that said gravity is it’s only known property.

Now please slap yourself for comparing Newton, and something based entirly on verifiable observation, with String Theory, which can’t be confirmed or disproven experimentally, and depends entirly on math, to the point that there are many different, equally valid versions of it. :p